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Reiss, though, has sensibly judged that such formal, portentous language would be improbable coming from a young student, as Masha has become in the new production. And so her version chops up the conversation, reflecting the verbal style of a young woman who texts and probably also tweets, and would show far less reflex social courtesy to interrogation by a dull schoolteacher than her Russian predecessor felt obliged to.
I am writing a play which I shall probably not finish before the end of November. Chekhov begins The Seagull with one of the heavily expository conversations from which modern dramatists are discouraged but which were standard in 19th-century theatre. Product details Format Paperback pages Dimensions x x 7. Letter to Suvorin, 18 October Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the script forced Stanislavski to dig beneath the surface of the text in ways that were new in theatre. Konstantin has had some short stories published, but is increasingly depressed.
In Reiss's adaptation, Medvedenko starts the play by challenging, "Again? A single line of dialogue in the traditional adaptations has become three questions, and a statement and the second sentence now divides into five:.
Reiss, whose own plays show an almost digital clarity in recording the tics of contemporary speech, has not only stripped the speeches of their facile delivery of back-story but also caught the cagey, resentful, fragmentary nature of much modern inter-generational conversation, through the way in which Masha instinctively treats her senior as a sort of policeman.
Later, the writer disrupts the expected rhythms of the play's curtain lines with equal success. Any reader who has not yet seen a production of The Seagull, and plans to, should perhaps be warned that the next paragraphs cannot avoid a Chekhovian plot-spoiler. The play ends with Konstantin Treplyov, an aspiring playwright, killing himself off-stage.
Dorn, the doctor, goes to investigate the noise of a shot, discovers the body and returns to murmur the news to Trigorin, a famous novelist who is a house guest. The radicalism of the scene is that the physician chooses not to interrupt a game of cards involving the dead man's mother, but to confide the information in an undertone to a single other character.
Russian speakers have told me that it is almost impossible to capture in English the astonishing off-handedness of Dr Dorn's delivery.
Frayn fluent in Russian gives the line as: In other versions, I have heard the first part of the speech presented as "the thing is" and "by the way"; it will probably not be long before it is translated as that favourite introductory trope of modern conversation: Reiss's solution is to have Dorn saying: When I interviewed Reiss and the actor Matthew Kelly for Front Row, he explained that he had convinced her that the information could be conveyed by the words alone.
Again, this seems the right decision to me.
Reiss's fractured, allusive reference to the death that closes the play both reflects the sawn-off nature of much contemporary talk and acknowledges that, in the years since The Seagull was first staged, audiences, due to TV and film, have become quicker at picking things up, needing to be told less.
It's common to complain that translation inevitably involves loss, but Reiss's exciting new rendition of The Seagull offers gains by adjusting a great drama to how we speak and hear now.
I will be intrigued to see what the forthcoming David Duchovny film Relative Insanity — which relocates The Seagull to modern New York — does with those famous opening and closing lines. Other books in this series.
Photograph 51 Anna Ziegler. George Orwell's George Orwell.
Peter and Alice John Logan. People, Places and Things Duncan Macmillan.
Every Brilliant Thing Duncan Macmillan. A Disappearing Number Complicite. Talking to Terrorists Robin Soans.
Something Dark Lemn Sissay. About Anton Chekhov Torben Betts' other plays include: He wrote the screenplay for the feature film Downhill, which was released in cinemas in May Book ratings by Goodreads.